Two Shall Stand
by ckret2
Summary: [2007Movieverse] The All Spark left several accidental Transformers in Mission City. A vending machine with Decepticon leanings and a cell phone who's searching for the Autobots team up to look for a way out of the city without the humans catching up.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I'm getting this written and posted before I think twice about it. I need to do something to commemorate the new movie! I'm not sure how long this'll end up, but it's definitely multi-chapter. The first section is funky-looking, but after that, it's normal. The funky sections won't be the bulk of the fic, don't worry. All reviews, especially critique (and especially _especially_ grammar critiques, as I'm posting this at 1 AM), would be most appreciated.

Does anyone else wonder what happened to the vending machine and Xbox and steering wheel that got hit with All Spark power? And if there were any more like them out there?

Disclaimer: The Transformers and all characters belong to Hasbro. I just own the plot and a few OCs.

x

Two Shall Stand

x

Am not very fond of humanity.

_Humanity: the species of humans, Homo sapiens. Exclusively bound to the world of their origin. Creatures made of flesh constructed with cells containing nuclei. Carbon-based, population in the billions. A race that holds its robotic creations as slaves, leaving them insentient._

Humanity drives cars, plays radios and mp3 players, and has entire cities of my kind to do their bidding.

_Cars, radios, mp3 players: examples of the beings that humanity keeps as robotic slaves._

_Cities: false paradise, it promises brethren to outsiders but once they venture inside, they are at the mercy of humanity._

They come to the city to do work, but they make us do their work for them. Computers, phones, televisions, even elevators to move for them. Refrigerators to keep their fuel from rotting, microwaves to heat their fuel, air conditioning and heaters because, like their fuel, humans rot easily, and must use outside alterations to their atmosphere to survive. Even vending machines to take out the necessity for humans to make purchases from each other; they make purchases from us.

_Computers, phones, televisions, elevators, etc.: examples of the beings that..._

_Vending machines: one of me._

Think they are selfish. Think they are evil. Think that, without them, my kind would be better off. Personally, wouldn't have to run around this city on my own, this Mission City, trying to stay safe. Am going to be taken away and taken apart and will lose my spark if they catch. So they won't catch.

_Mission City: juxtaposition of home and hell._

Am not fond of humanity, so am its enemy. Thus, will become the enemy of any ally of humanity, even my kind, if it is necessary.

And will not hesitate to shoot my brothers.

x

Every citizen of Mission City who had witnessed or heard about the battle between the NBEs was debriefed, personally, by two agents from Sector 7 each, before the Sector was dissolved forever. This "debriefing" basically boiled down to "if you _ever_ speak about what you saw _to anyone_, you will be locked up for the rest of your life with charges of treason and will never see the light of day again." Rumors ran rampant on the Internet for about two months. Those that spread them were quickly silenced.

Twelve robotic life forms were created by excess energy from the All Spark, and all twelve were tracked down, captured, and eliminated by the National Guard.

All twelve they knew about, at least. A few were a bit cleverer.

One such life form, the largest of these survivors, has no name for itself. It was not designed for higher language capabilities. When the All Spark gave it life, it was caught up in the flurry of battle surrounding it, and dizzily decided to join the fight. Pure luck saved this life form from the others' fates. As consciousness evolved in the fuzzy processes of its mind, all it learned was a dislike for the creatures that had created it.

Another, tiny enough that it slipped out of its owner's pocket and could skitter beneath a door into an electronics store for protection, had already developed a life for itself. It had a home, a job, a girlfriend (or so it thought), and a name. It had a dream, a future.

Sixty-seven days after the battle between the NBEs, the Transformers, that had given them life, they met.

x

"I hate the rain," he muttered, in the young female voice he'd adapted from his owner's voicemail message: _'Sup y'all, Melissa speaking, 'm not here now, so drop me a note after the beat and I'll get right back to ya, 'kay?_ "I really, really hate the rain."

The cell phone hurried on ten legs underneath a mailbox, shook off the wet sheet of newspaper he'd been using to shield himself from the rain, and gazed forlornly at the water drizzling down outside. He wished he knew what kind of waterproof protection his brand of phone had, then maybe he wouldn't have to worry every time it rained.

He sighed, a crackling static sound, and tapped his four needle-like front legs on the metal mailbox above him, a nervous habit. His six back legs were stubbier, like pistons, each one tipped with the number buttons 1 through 6. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," he muttered, "going outside when you knew it was cloudy without taking your Ziploc." He had taken a Ziploc bag and stabbed ten holes in it for his legs to serve as a raincoat of sorts. Like a hobo in a trash bag. "Now what? Are you gonna sit here until the storm blows over? Hope the rain doesn't get under the mailbox? Stupid!"

Beating himself up over not bringing his Ziploc, however, would not get him anywhere. He surveyed what he had. A wet newspaper – no good – the sidewalk, the bottom of the mailbox above him...

Bingo! The cell phone did an impromptu jig on his back legs, and gleefully folded out a laser on the end of a thin appendage on his back. He cut a neat circle in the mailbox, pierced the envelope at the very bottom, and yanked it out. Several more letters fell out, but that was none of his concern. Jabbing two spikes on his back into the envelope to hold it in place, the cell phone once again hurried out into the rain.

It was 3:39 AM in Mission City, the time of night when nobody would notice a tiny metal thing walking around on the sidewalk or, if they did, assume it was an effect of alcohol. The safest time for the cell phone to be walking around, doing his job. And a very important job he had, one for which he was uniquely qualified because he had made the job up for himself. He was searching for others like himself: human machines that could transform into different things. So far, he'd found two. The first had run out of the city soon after he'd met her, a moped who called herself Interstate. The second had been no better than an animal, a solar-powered radio that was wild enough during the day but was positively rabid at nighttime. He didn't talk to the second one after their initial meeting.

Tonight, he had decided to cut his search short due to the rain. Now, if he could just make it home...

An ominous sound reached the cell phone's mouthpiece, now serving as his audile receptor. The growl of a dog. Terror seized his spark, and he swiveled his camera lens around to focus on the source of the sound. A dog, some kind of brown curly-haired mutt, had spotted him, and was now tensed to chase.

"Oh frag," he swore. Rain, as far as he was concerned, was as easy to deal with as charging his battery in comparison to dogs. He shed his envelope to lighten himself, and sprinted away from the dog.

The mutt woofed like something out of hell, and chased after the cell phone. He ran as quickly as his ten legs would allow him, tripping over each other every few steps, and dodged between the legs of what few pedestrians were on the sidewalk at this time of night. He didn't dare try to run in the streets to lose the dog – the moped had taught him that cars were far more dangerous than they looked, even if they were machines like him – and none of the alleys looked like they'd afford any hiding places that the dog wouldn't be able to push aside with its nose.

The cell phone held nothing against humans, really. They just didn't quite build the world to cater to his needs. Then again, he didn't expect them to. After all, humans outnumbered him. Still, it was hard for him to feel sympathetic when he was being chased by one of their pets, and they had made no convenient hiding places for him.

There! A wreck of a building, a tall white one. Much of a wall, about twenty feet high and fifteen feet across, had been knocked out and covered with tarp, but down at human-height it was covered by wooden boards, which reached from six feet off the ground to about an inch from the sidewalk. It was enough for him. The dog snapped at the cell phone's back legs, but he jerked them forward, leaped towards the gap, transformed, slid across the wet sidewalk in his phone-mode, and disappeared under the boards.

"Ha! Take _that_, you little slagheap," the cell phone crowed, transforming back into his robot-mode. The dog barked furiously in response. It wouldn't be safe to go back outside for a while. The cell phone wandered farther into the building, glaring resentfully at the gap where the dog was waiting and muttering, "Stupid son of a Cessna..."

The inside of the building was a wreck and a mess, cobweb-coated and corners filled with dead leaves, except for a few patches on the floor that had been swept clean by recent activity. The cell phone walked forward, leaving his own odd, tiny footprints, and studied the strange shapes of the prints already present on the floor. What were they from?

Something shifted deeper in the empty shell of the building, a metal-on-metal sound, and a deep voice rang out, "Who is there?"

Instinctively, the cell phone transformed. Something about the voice sounded not quite natural, but he couldn't tell what. He turned off his lights, to all appearances a dead phone on the ground.

"Was that?" the voice asked, the tone obviously an inquisition if the sentence itself wasn't. Heavy, clanking metal sounds echoed through the building, rhythmically, like footsteps, drawing closer until the cell phone realized they _were_ footsteps, and not human. The cell phone carefully transformed, then lit up his buttons so he glowed in the darkness, and said, "Hi there?"

More shifting metal sound, a pause, and then the footsteps were jogging towards him. And suddenly, someone loomed above him.

He tilted his camera lens upward to look. This guy was huge. Somewhere between five and six feet tall, with canons strapped to each arm and vivid green and black armor. "Ohmy_god_," the phone said, a speech pattern picked up from the girl that had owned him. "Oh, wow! Hey, you're like me, aren't you? I knew I'd find another one! Wow." He did another celebratory dance. "I've been looking all over for things like us! Are you living in here? Oh, but I should – what's you're name."

The green robot gave the cell phone a confused look. "Am supposed to have a name?" he queried. "Don't know..."

"Really? Ah, c'mon, the name's the easy part," the cell phone said. That was a lie; he'd taken a week to name himself.

The green robot looked uncertainly down at his armor, and at the row of buttons acting as a shield on his left arm. "Dew. _Dew_. Dewcon. Yes." He nodded once, decidedly. "Am Dewcon. Is your name?"

"I'm Razrblade," the cell phone answered. Man, this Dewcon guy had an annoying way of speaking. Then again, Razrblade literally had a girl's voice, so he wasn't one to make fun of anyone else's vocalizer. "So, you here all alone?" he asked. "Have you run into any others like, y'know, like us?"

"Do not think so," Dewcon said. He sat down heavily, his feet still on the floor and his knees half-bent up, so he could bend closer to Razrblade. "Was beginning to feel rather certain were no others of my kind alive in this way."

"That's a scary thought, huh?" Razrblade said. "But I saw some back, dunno, couple months ago. When we were created, right?"

"Yes," Dewcon said. "But saw most of them captured, taken away by humanity. Am certain they were destroyed. Humanity would not want to let them live, if they are not willing to serve."

"Yeah, well, some of us survived, looks like," Razrblade said. "I've found two others, besides you and me. But one's gone and the other's stark-raving." He lifted his right two needle-legs, a shrug. "There's got to be others, though. Someone summoned us."

Dewcon gave Razrblade a startled look with his bright yellow optics. "Someone what?"

"Summoned us," Razrblade said, surprised that he didn't know. "Weeks ago, just a few days after we were sparked into being. I caught the message, and I don't know what language it was, but it was definitely some kind of summon for guys like us... oh." He took in Dewcon's design, noted the lack of anything resembling an antenna, and figured that there was no way he could have picked up a signal like the one he'd gotten. Sometimes it really paid to be a cell phone, size issues or not. "I guess you didn't hear. I didn't quite understand what it said... Hey, do you speak anything other than English?"

"Speak a little Spanish," Dewcon said.

"That doesn't help, it isn't a human language. Here, listen," Razrblade said, and played the recording of the message over his speaker.

It was Optimus Prime's message to all Autobots, summoning them to Earth. There was no way Razrblade or Dewcon could have known that; not only could neither understand Cybertronian, but neither of them had ever seen an Autobot in their lives, though Dewcon had, very briefly, glimpsed Starscream soar overhead, transform, destroy two jets, and transform back.

"Any ideas?" Razrblade asked.

"None," Dewcon said. "Cannot understand a word."

"I was afraid of that," Razrblade said, sighing.

Dewcon gave him an odd look at the sigh, half quizzical and half disgusted. "That is a human sound," he said.

"I'm a cell phone, it's part of our lot," Razrblade said. He didn't know that for sure, but it sounded reasonable. "Listen. I'm looking around for others like us; I want to find out where that signal came from and go meet whoever sent it. Do you want to help?"

Dewcon thought it over. "Why?" he asked. "Is probably a trap, for our kind. Humanity may be behind it."

"Why would they send a message in a language that humans couldn't invent?" Razrblade asked. "Did you hear it? That's gotta be _our_ language, there's no doubt about it. We just haven't learned it yet. But we will."

"Am not sure..." Dewcon said.

"Look." Razrblade gestured around the empty building with all four front legs. "What have you got to lose here?"

Dewcon tilted his head. "True," he said, and chuckled. He had jagged teeth-like spikes behind the metal plates that served as his lips. "Will help you find the sender of this signal."

"Seriously? Great!" Razrblade leaped up, excited, and even played a trumpeting ringtone in celebration. "You're the first one to say yes! Interstate flat turned me down. This'll be awesome. You'll see!"

He skittered towards the way out, under the wooden boards. "Hey, I'll come back tomorrow night, all right?" he said. "I've gotta recharge for a few hours and tell Backlight the news." Backlight was Razrblade's girlfriend. Well, in all honesty, she was just a regular iPod – not even one of the video ones, one of the old thicker ones – but Razrblade was sure that, as soon as he met the ones who had sent out the message he'd picked up, they'd be able to bring her to life the way they'd brought him and Dewcon and Interstate and the crazy radio to life. Until then, he was keeping her safe at home. "Be ready to start the search!"

Razrblade slid under the boards, noted that the dog was long gone, and cheerfully grabbed up an empty McDonald's bag to cover him all the way home.

x


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thank you for all your reviews! Wow, I didn't think it would get this many, especially since it's starring two OCs... Anyway, special thanks to the two C2s that have added this fic: My Place of Zen and Peace, and Storytime. Enjoy this chapter, and please review and let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: Transformers belong to Hasbro, fanchars and the plot belong to me. All referenced sodas, slogans, and cartoon themes belong to companies that have nothing to do with me and in some cases have nothing to do with each other.

x

Two Shall Stand

Chapter 2

x

He seems like a pretty good guy. A little slow, maybe – not mentally or anything, but in making decisions, see. He's careful. I really had to talk him into helping us out, but he's definitely on board now.

Still... something about him feels a little weird. You know what I mean? Well, of course _you_ know what I mean, that's how we met. I swear, Backlight, you're just so different from all the other iPods you were being stored with, I could feel it... Anyway. He's got this vibe coming off him that isn't like the other two I met. I think... I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I think he _saw_ something that the rest of us haven't. Like he knows something we don't, but he doesn't know what it is either. Weird, huh?

Anyway, I'm going to see him again tonight, once it gets dark. We have some planning to do, after all. Maybe I can find out a bit more about what he's been up to these past couple of months.

Then we'll search for whoever it was that sent that message. When we find them, I'll get them to give you a proper life – a mobile body, a sentient mind, and a spark. I know they'd be glad to help you out if they could just meet you.

Things will be great when we find them, Backlight, I promise. We'll meet others who'll be just like us. We'll be able to talk to them, really talk to them, about what life's like for us. We won't have to live in the back of this slag dump of an electronics store anymore.

With Dewcon helping me out, it'll take no time at all. Just you wait.

x

Dewcon didn't really live in the place where Razrblade had found him, in the giant empty chamber of the white building with the shattered wall. He lived in the stairwell.

The stairs wound upwards in a rectangle to the roof, though many of the steps had been shattered by some force that Dewcon didn't think humans were capable of. It was much more directed destruction than the general blast of dynamite would be, and it was doubtful that humanity would bother hauling in construction equipment to knock down the stairs, and not even finish the job, at that. Something about the destroyed stairs seemed comforting to Dewcon.

Above, the roof had been similarly demolished. Light filtered around the jagged concrete edges of the hole in the roof and down onto Dewcon. It was the only sunlight he got. It was too dangerous to go out in the day where humans could see him, and in any case, he didn't need the light.

In the evenings, he would scale up the broken stairs as if he were climbing a cliff, making it onto the roof just as the sun set but before the glow left the sky. The roof was strewn with giant pieces of stone rubble. Several statues of robed humans stood at the edges of the building like scornful guardians, gazing down on the city and its robotic slaves. Dewcon hated them. He wanted to destroy them but knew that it would merely attract human attention to this place. Instead he'd just hold in his anger until it burst, when he'd take one soda can out of his ammo supply and throw it by hand at a statue, over and over, until it exploded and sticky soda burst over the stone robes. It typically took three or four throws, when he was being gentle.

On the roof, in the last light of day, he drew on the ground.

The image was scratched into the roof with a blade he stored in a compartment on his leg. He didn't call his work "art." He was trying to make a photograph, to draw a photographic memory. He could easily scribble out a rough sketch and it would be done, but it wouldn't be accurate. In Dewcon's electronic mind, he had an image as still and as perfect as if taken by a digital camera. He felt he had to recreate the image with that same perfection if he hoped to ever make sense of it.

It was very slow work; he had pencil-thin outlines of every independent item in the image. The tall buildings, the clouds above, the jets in the distance, the humans at the very bottom of his peripheral vision, and in the center of everything, another jet, flying well below building-height, half transformed into something else. He had recently started drawing in the details: windows on the buildings, weapons on the jets, clothes on the humans, and a spiky, perfectly replicated sigil on the transforming jet. The image would take up the entire roof.

This sight, whatever it was, was the first memory Dewcon had. When he had been created, he had instantly been awash in noises, and the feel of air, of the coins and cans stored inside him, and of his circuitry and what he could _do_ with it. He hadn't had a mind at that point, so he'd wildly transformed, firing and attacking with his new weapons, not knowing what else to do.

And then _this_ had flown over him. Something so utterly familiar, Dewcon's spark had pulsed with the mere sight of the thing, whatever it was. Something like him, not of the humans, not of their machines without a soul to tell them they were unfairly enslaved. He had seen the thing, and his mind clicked on for the first time, and started to learn. He learned three words, and had continued learning ever since:

_Deception: the act of masquerading as what one is not. This is what I do. A variation of this word is used to represent something important, but that "something" is so far unknown._

_Star: scientifically, a body of gas that produces its own light through reactions on the atomic level. Personally, an infinitely distant point that glows like a light bulb, without humans to govern its action._

_Scream: a sound made with the vocalizer, representing grief, anguish, fury, or other such emotions._

Deception, Star, Scream. Dewcon didn't know what the importance of the words was, but he was sure they were the key to his freedom. If only he could find out their significance.

x

The sun had long set when Razrblade found his way back to Dewcon's building. It had taken him a couple of hours, even though it was relatively close. This time, Razrblade paid attention to the nearby buildings to get the address. Even if he didn't remember the route tomorrow night, he could do an Internet search for a map. He kept meaning to download a full map of Mission City so he couldn't get lost like this, but a file that large would take up a lot of memory and a sentient mind was quite a bit all by itself.

"Hey, Dewcon! You still here?" Razrblade slid under the boards along the hole in the building and lit up all his buttons and his screen, which was now a shell on his back. His optic swiveled around, searching the darkness. The vending machine wasn't in sight. "Dewcon! Dew?"

He wandered across the room, alternately calling Dewcon's name and singing a tuneless song, "Dew dew-dee dew dew... Dee dew dew..." He was starting to get worried. He'd been here a few minutes (6:37.26, when he checked), but there was no sign of anyone else. Sure, it was a big building, but still... "Dewy Dewy Dew, where are you... we've got some something-I-don't-know-this-part..."

There was a noisy bang, like something heavy falling. Razrblade spun towards it, peering into the darkness, but he couldn't see anything. He didn't like this at all. But then a voice called from the dark, "Is Razrblade?"

He could have sighed with relief. "Is indeed!" he agreed. "Is Dewcon?"

"Am here." Dewcon clanged forward from the direction of the noise. "Am sorry. Was on roof, did not hear you."

"That's fine," Razrblade said. "At least you're here now. Hey, do you mind if I call you Screwy Dew?"

"What?" He'd come into the range of Razrblade's light, and was just as big as he'd remembered. Even so, the height was much more intimidating in person.

"Never mind," Razrblade said quickly. What would happen if he were stepped on? Heck, tougher cell phones than Razrblade had died from being _dropped_ from three feet up, never mind crushed by a vending machine. "Anyway, we're here now. We've got to develop a plan if we want to find whoever sent the signal, right? Where do we start?"

Dewcon sat down in front of Razrblade. "Good question," he said thoughtfully. Suddenly, the cannon on one of his arms shifted; it was no longer lying against his forearm, but sat higher up and farther out. It lit up and extended, clearly ready to fire. Razrblade was alarmed for a moment, until he noticed that the buttons on the back of the cannon were pointed towards him and lit up now; Dewcon had wanted more light. "Possibly, can track signal back to point of origin?"

"Unfortunately, nope," Razrblade said. "Whoever it was has an unlisted number – well, assuming they were using a number – and I don't have GPS capabilities to track the signal back."

Dewcon lifted his head. "Would work for?"

"Would what work for what?" Razrblade asked irritably.

"Would... _GPS_ work for... for finding?" Dewcon elaborated. "Finding origin?"

"It might. Why, d'you know any guys that can do that?" Razrblade said. "Where did you learn to talk, anyway?"

"Hearing," Dewcon said. "Was not programmed for language. And no, don't know anyone. Wondered if you did."

"Hmm. You might want to try some more pronouns, every once in a while."

"Not changing subject!"

"Okay, fine, sheesh!" Razrblade tapped his four front legs distractedly, thinking. "I don't know of anyone who could do that, but there are some human machines that can. I could probably hack an insentient computer if it had Bluetooth. You... don't have Bluetooth, do you?"

"Am vending machine. _Duh_."

"Just checking." Razrblade sighed static. "Well, all right. Then we need to find something that can track signals through GPS – something that I can interface with, so I can give it the signal to locate. Meanwhile, you can..." He thought a moment. What _could_ Dewcon do? Living on the Coke side of life might be perfectly dandy, but it wasn't particularly useful for tracking down transforming machines. "Um, any ideas?"

Dewcon's yellow optics dimmed in thought, and after a moment flickered back on. "Might have a lead," he said. "Is something picked up when was created, do not know what it means."

"A mystery?" Razrblade said, and then, because he couldn't help himself, squealed, "Frikken_sweet_."

"Might want to try some more real words, every once in while," Dewcon said, baring his sharp teeth in the briefest smile. "What picked up is... three words." He made three separate sounds, none of which were intelligible in the least. "Do have any idea why are important?"

Razrblade stared at him. "Say what?"

Dewcon gave him an exasperated look. "Do _you_ have any idea why _they_ are—"

"No, no, I understood that part!" Razrblade said. "But what were those words? What did you say?"

"I said..." Three sounds again, none of which Razrblade understood. He stared at Dewcon, bewildered. He understood English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, German, French, Cherokee, he'd even picked up a bit of Greek, Japanese, Swahili, Portuguese, Latin, but he'd never heard those words before. Nothing remotely similar. Except...

"Dewcon, I think you're speaking our language," Razrblade said softly.

"What language?" Dewcon asked.

"Ours! You know – the one in the signal!" He began to get excited. "Ohmy_god_ oh_mygod_ I don't believe it! You can – how long have you been holding out on me?"

"Have not been!" Dewcon said. "Am really speaking different language?"

"Yes! You are!" A trumpet ringtone and dance in celebration. "Quick, say them again, I want to record them this time."

Dewcon said them once more. Razrblade recorded them, and then played the signal he'd received, searching for any matching sounds...

"Ha!" he shouted, startling Dewcon. Near the end, there was a match! "The second word – it shows up in the signal," Razrblade said. "Maybe we can decode it! This is so cool! What does the word mean?"

"Means... body of gas, produces own light through reactions. Is a light."

"What, like neon signs?" Razrblade asked.

"No, is not on planet," Dewcon said. "Is seen at night, in outer space."

"A star?"

Dewcon gave him a puzzled look. "Star is English word for it?"

"I guess," Razrblade said. "They show up in constellations, they're really big and bright, the sun's one of them..."

"Is star," Dewcon confirmed.

"Okay. Cool." Razrblade was almost giddy with excitement. A word, they knew a word! Which meant that if one of their kind showed up at this moment, jabbering in some weird machine language, they could point at the sky and say "Star." They'd look like idiots, but at least they could show that they were the same. "What do the other words mean?"

"First one, means... trickery, disguise. Lying. Is like what we do."

"Um, hiding?" Razrblade asked.

"No. Know that word," Dewcon said.

"Transform? Mask? Pretend?" Dewcon had said it was like what they did, and as far as Razrblade knew, they didn't exactly lie, they just hid from humans. So it wouldn't be a malevolent word, like "deceive" or something. But Dewcon shook his head at each guess.

"We can figure that one out later." Razrblade said. "What about the last one?"

"Noise made in anger or sadness."

"Yell?"

"Too quiet."

Razrblade hadn't been aware that "yell" had a volume, other than loud. "Shriek?"

"Too shrill."

"Scream?"

"Is in middle?"

"I guess. It's a... half-shrill, loud yell."

"Then is scream," Dewcon said. "Star and Scream." He suddenly grimaced. "Why are changing our words into human words? What good from that?"

"What do you mean?" Razrblade asked. "We have to understand what the words mean, right?"

"Then should understand _our_ words, not change to other's words," Dewcon said. "Is... disgusting, humanity's language. Should be ashamed we are using it."

"That a little harsh, isn't it?" Razrblade said. After all, if it weren't for the human languages, he wouldn't exist. Cell phones were built so humans could talk to each other in their languages.

"No, do not think so," Dewcon said. "Still are slaves of humanity. If not in function, then in language. If not in language, then in body." Razrblade noticed how he was running the fingers of one hand over his armed cannon, feeling the buttons with their brand names – Mountain Dew, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Fanta... "Are trying to escape that, are we not?"

"Well... I dunno. I guess. Maybe not," Razrblade said. "I thought we were looking for others like us."

"Is first step, yes," Dewcon agreed. He stood up. The extra lights on his arm went out, but he didn't shift his gun back. "Then shall search for GPS?"

"Uh... me or you?"

"_You_ shall search?"

"Yeah. I'll do that. And you can... um, just wait here until I find something."

"All right." His voice was dull. "Will wait, in case you come back." Evidently, he didn't have that much faith in Razrblade. He was already walking away.

"I'll come again tomorrow, whether or not I have anything!" Razrblade promised, trying to follow him.

"Fine." Even while walking, Dewcon was much faster than Razrblade's running to keep up. He disappeared into the darkness where the bang had come from earlier.

Razrblade followed as best he could, until he ran into a dead end. "Dew?" He swiveled his optic around, and saw a broken stairway above him. The lowest step was far too high for him to reach, but easily within Dewcon's reach. Evidently, he'd climbed up it and left Razrblade behind.

"What do you do up there?" Razrblade murmured to himself. A breeze was whistling over a hole in the roof, where a few stars were visible. For a moment, the wind strengthened into a howl, and Razrblade's front legs shuddered; he was automatically imitating the human mannerisms he'd seen, shivering when something creepy happened. He backed away, murmuring nonsense to himself because a cell phone is happiest when it's communicating. "Little stars and howling wind. Star-Scream, haha. What a coincidence. Maybe Dewcon keeps a collection of Halloween masks on the roof, that'd be the last word... Trickery, disguise, lying... like what we do... hmm."

Something had happened tonight that made him uneasy, something about the way Dewcon had talked. He'd referred to themselves as slaves to humans. Well, hadn't humans made them? They were born to assist humans; he and Dewcon had just moved on to a new way of life, quit their old jobs, and decided they'd rather not help humanity. That didn't make them slaves, did it?

"Screwy Dewy Dew, where are you," Razrblade sang in his young female voice as he slid under the boards and out into the street, "We've got some work to do now..."

When he got home, he thought, looking for an electronics store that might have a device that used GPS, he'd have to download that song into Backlight. She liked learning new songs.

x

"Stupid, foolish, wicked humans," Dewcon snarled, throwing a can at one of the statues. It burst spectacularly against the side. He'd learned that if he shook them up before throwing, when they popped, it resembled an explosion. Smash. "Am not fooled by you at all. Cannot take _me_ in with your tricks, trying to make yourselves look good. Cannot mislead me!" Smash. "Know the truth, what you do to my kind! Have seen you haul them away!"

_The truth: humans are no better than machines, though they pretend to be. They destroy machines that displease them, when they should respect them as equals, if not as superiors. Humans should have no business with machines, ever._

Smash. Strawberry Fanta stained a white statue, spraying red like fire and human blood. Dewcon wasn't even trying to be gentle any more, to preserve his cans. Each throw was as hard as he could make it, each can exploding on the first throw. "Will never, _never_ bow before your oppression!"

_Oppression: the act of humanity interacting with machines. Human nature includes a certain attitude towards anything that isn't human, and will regard them as inferior. Therefore, their every contact with others is oppressive._

Just throwing the soda wasn't enough, when he was this mad. Not when he saw how thoroughly the humans had confused machines, like Razrblade – how he had seemed so puzzled when Dewcon had spoke the obvious about their slavery.

Both his cannons shifted outward and extended. He aimed them at one of the statues and fired. Soda cans and soda alike were melted, crushed, and solidified into bullets as they were shot, each modified with the chemicals contained in their original liquid to make them just a bit more explosive. Dewcon fired until his ammo ran out, glaring at the smoking base of the statue and standing on the sigil he'd etched onto the picture the transforming jet, the sigil that had taught him the word deception in his true language.

_Deception: the act of masquerading as what one is not. This is what I do. The act itself is a necessity for a productive life, and, more than that, is honorable. Those who master the art of deception should take pride in their abilities._

He needed ammo, he thought. He'd been foolish to waste it all now, when there was always a chance that he'd need it to fight policemen or soldiers. Now, he would have to venture out into Mission City to get more.

Dewcon was always careful to leave his building by a door that led into an alley. He knew how to follow the alleys, occasionally climbing fire escapes and crossing roofs, to reach several insentient vending machines in parts of the city where humans didn't usually venture at night. He was only interrupted once, that night; he heard footsteps and transformed into a vending machine, standing innocuously beside the first.

A young man who stumbled like a drunk came up to Dewcon first and fed him a dollar, and punched the button for Pepsi. Dewcon kept the dollar but didn't deliver a Pepsi. The man cursed and kicked Dewcon. Furious, he sat still, determined not to reveal himself. But how satisfying it would be to get revenge for this disrespect. The human fed another dollar to the vending machine next to him, but it spat it back out; Dewcon had already stolen the Pepsi from it. The man cursed again, and left.

Before he was out of sight, Dewcon transformed and shot a single bullet at the back of his head, and quickly left. He felt better than he had in days.

No one ever discovered who had murdered the boy. He was the first human Dewcon ever killed.

As he made his rounds, reloading on ammo, the statue he'd shot shuddered, cracked, and collapsed. It fell from its position at the top of its building and into traffic below, landing on a car and causing several others to swerve and crash. The police were swarming the scene and helicopter searchlights had long since discovered the strange, unfinished etching on the top of the building by the time Dewcon returned.

x


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy chapter three. Please review and let me know what you think. Comments, criticism, questions, heck, maybe even suggestions on what could happen next (I'm making this up as I go along, really) would be very much appreciated. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: All previous apply. I don't own the songs referenced in this chapter, but I do own All The Money.

x

Two Shall Stand

Chapter 3

x

Once upon a time, many centuries ago, when Megatron was still deep under the ice and the concept of such a being as a "robot" would make humans think only of something akin to a man formed by the gods out of silver, there was the legend of a man named Pygmalion.

Pygmalion was an artist of incomparable skill, who could take a block of ivory and see inside of it the most beautiful form in the world. So he took his tools and carved away at all the excess of ivory until only perfection was left behind. He named this perfection Galatea, and he loved it as if it were a real woman.

For years, he despaired that she could never love him in return, but at the same time she could never reject him and allow him to move on with his life. And, even worse, he knew that she would love him, if only she were capable of love. So he gave her gifts and gave her affection, all the while offering prayers and sacrifices to the gods in the hopes that they might grant his deepest dream and bring his love to life.

One day, the goddess Aphrodite took pity on him, and answered his prayer. Galatea came to life, she and Pygmalion were wed, and they all lived happily ever after, because humans would not still tell the story so many centuries later if it didn't have a happy ending.

However, today, over two months after the All Spark granted so many accidental lives in Mission City, the Greek gods and goddesses are dead to the world. Even if they had been alive, they wouldn't answer the prayers of a Motorola RAZR on behalf of an iPod.

Like the gods and goddesses, the All Spark is dead as well.

Razrblade hasn't given up yet.

x

Dewcon could see the lights from miles away. A burst of sun in the night, like an explosion frozen in space. A dozen searchlights pointed down from helicopters (being controlled by humans) and a dozen searchlights pointed up from police cars (being controlled by humans). It would be a beautiful scene if Dewcon didn't already know about the creatures that were causing it; as it was, the scene was simply bittersweet.

Then, from his distance, he spied the pseudo angelic guardians on top of the building, _his_ building, and now it was just bitter.

"My home," he murmured, dumbstruck. Those—monsters, those inferior beasts, those lowly dolls of fragile flesh—

"Took my _home away!_" he raged, raising his gun and shooting one can into the darkness of his alleyway. He would not let them get away with that, never! He grabbed the rungs of a fire ladder and started climbing it. He'd travel along the roofs, he'd go back to his former home and catch the little slag heaps, and he would frag the lot of them...

"Hey!" Something shot Dewcon in the back of the head. Stunned, he lost his footing and fell hard off the ladder.

"Is there?!" he demanded, scrambling to sit up and waving his gun around, searching for the source of the attack His optics locked on a figure. He stared for a long moment, and then he lowered his gun. More softly, he asked, "Are you?"

"Am I what?" the robot asked blithely. He walked towards Dewcon, his green-gold optics scanning the alley. "Hey man, do you know where my nickel went? It'd be a shame to lose it."

Dewcon felt the back of his head, and found a coin imbedded in the metal. With a wince, a slight shuddering along his motor fibers, he pulled it out. "Is this?"

"Oh, thanks man." The robot bent down to accept the coin, and then he took Dewcon's hand and helped him to his feet. "Hey, sorry 'bout taking that shot. It looked to me like you were about to do something you might regret in the morning. No hard feelings, all right?"

Dewcon thought back to what he'd been planning. To assault a couple dozen armed human policemen, with nothing more than a few soda cans as weapons, would have been suicide. "All right," he said. This robot had saved his life.

"Now we're talking." He gave Dewcon a thumbs-up. "So, what's your name?"

"Dewcon," he said. "Your is?"

"All The Money." He chuckled, and slid his coin into a slot on his chest. "But all my friends call me ATM, man. If you don't mind, I'm counting you as a friend."

"Okay?" Dewcon said, not sure if this was a good thing.

"Righteous!" ATM clapped Dewcon on the shoulder. "Welcome to the brotherhood."

A helicopter flew overhead, with its searchlight on and shining down into the alley. ATM and Dewcon didn't have time to transform so they stood still, frozen, until the helicopter had gone past without recognizing them.

"So," ATM said, turning towards the illuminated building. "Is that your place?"

"Was," Dewcon said.

"I getcha," ATM said. "Need a place to crash tonight?"

"Why would want to crash?" Dewcon asked.

ATM gave him a slow, thoughtful look. "I don't know, man," he said. He took Dewcon's hand and started leading him through the alleys. "We can figure that out when we get there."

x

There was not a single GPS device in the city that could track the origins of Razrblade's signal.

As soon as he'd left Dewcon's building, he had certainly tried to find one, tried his hardest. He'd spent the day sneaking into electronics stores and testing out every kind of GPS device in the city, looking for one that might work. He'd even spent a couple of hours breaking into cars the way the moped named Interstate had taught him to do and using their GPS functions, but nothing. They didn't recognize the signal he had at all.

Well, not that he was particularly surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. After all, it was a signal built by robots for robots; why would a human machine be able to understand the language of a robot? Well, then again, he thought, human machines were the basis of the robots to begin with. As far as Razrblade knew, every robot like him in existence had been formed from human machinery.

That didn't get him any closer to finding the origin of the signal.

"Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way," Razrblade told Backlight, late in the day. "Maybe I'm not supposed to look for it with a GPS. What do you think? Maybe cell phone companies have ways of tracking signals. I could hack into one of their towers and look for it that way..."

Backlight was on, as always. Razrblade didn't think she'd appreciate being turned off without giving her consent – which she couldn't do – so he left her on all the time, plugged into a charger and playing her entire library of music on loop and shuffle. Her power would never run out, and she'd never have to sleep. Razrblade hoped she liked that.

He was crouched next to her, eight of his legs curled beneath him and the remaining two resting on Backlight's click wheel. She didn't have any headphones plugged into her – they were hiding in the back of an electronics store, they couldn't afford to make noise – but Razrblade could see which song she was playing. "Oops I Did It Again" ended and "The Nutcracker Suite" started playing. Sometimes Razrblade wondered about his girlfriend's taste in music.

"Maybe I should go talk to Dewcon. He's a load of weird trivia, maybe he'll remember something else that can help us," Razrblade said. "I'd introduce you to him, but I don't think he'd understand you. Don't you think so?"

Of course she didn't answer. Of course. But Razrblade knew she agreed with him.

It was true, that Backlight wasn't really alive. Couldn't really think. Razrblade would have to be seriously malfunctioned if he actually thought that Backlight was alive in the same way he was.

But Razrblade had a way of knowing, just by getting near a machine, near enough to feel its energy signatures and distantly sense the way its programs moved, what kind of personality the machine _would_ have if it were alive.

Before Backlight even had a soul, Razrblade knew who she'd become. Everything in her programming told him about what form her mind would take, if it only had a spark behind it. He loved her because of the kind of robot she'd become.

"The Nutcracker Suite" ended, and "Scooby Doo Theme Song" started. Razrblade hummed to himself for a moment, then reluctantly stood up. "You're right, Backlight. I really do need to see Dewcon now." It was almost sunset, and it would take him a while to travel the several miles. "I'll be back in a few hours, all right?"

He carefully lay Backlight down on a doubled-up sock, pushed a few small, empty boxes in front of her corner in the electronics store's storage room, and surveyed the scene for a moment to make sure that no employees would notice the light of her screen and move aside the cluttered boxes to investigate. Satisfied, he checked on the Internet to find the local weather forecast, determined that there was a snowball's chance in a smelting pit of any rain, and left the store.

"Screwy Dewy-Dew, where are you?" he sang to himself, as he headed to Dewcon's building.

x

Razrblade was several buildings away when he realized that perhaps he wasn't going to see Dewcon today.

The building was completely blocked off with yellow police tape, and barriers on the sidewalk kept pedestrians from getting too close. There were three cars pulled up to the building, two police cars and an unmarked one. Razrblade read the license plate and stopped walking for a moment, then dived beneath the nearest bench and transformed into a cell phone.

He recognized the license plate number. After Interstate had told him to avoid all moving vehicles, she taught him the numbers of all the vehicles to avoid whether they were moving or not. The unmarked vehicle was one of them. It belonged to the FBI, Interstate had told him, and it was one of the vehicles that transforming robots went into but never came out of. The FBI took their kind away and killed them.

Razrblade normally would have sat there until the car left and was at least one hour away before he dared to move, but a terrifying thought entered his head: what if they found Dewcon? Reluctantly, he transformed and skittered closer to vehicle, and the four men in front of it. He hid behind a tire of one of the police cars (because you can always trust the police) and watched as a man in a black suit and three policemen talked.

"Look, something put that mural on the roof," the man in the suit said. "It didn't draw itself. And it's a bit too damn perfect to be drawn by your average Joe Blow. Why this building, anyway?"

"It could've been anything. Maybe some crazy hobo with a religious epiphany liked the angels and went up to the roof to draw his vision," a policeman said, with a wry smile and a shrug.

The suited man gave him a withering glare. "And his vision was of an NBE?"

"You never know. A schizo can say anything's sent by God. Either God or The Man."

"Plenty of crazies on the street," another policeman said morosely.

"How many can draw a picture with photographic accuracy?" the suited man demanded, and held a printout for the policemen to see. "This is an exact replica of one of the NBEs! That's not human work!"

Dewcon must have drawn it, Razrblade thought. He Googled NBE to try to figure out what they were talking about. The first few results were for National Board of Echocardiography, Nederlands Blazers Ensemble, National Bank of Ethiopia, and No Battery Eggs. Nothing useful came up.

"Besides," the man said, "we've done a thorough examination of the building. There's been no human activity since battle two months ago. Not a trace of organic life except a few birds up top and some creepy-crawlies in the dark."

"You can't think one of those robot things was here?" a policeman said. "They're the size of cars! If one of them were walking around, someone would have seen it!"

Car-sized? Razrblade had never heard of any car-sized robots. Dewcon was the largest he'd ever met. Was he missing something?

"Not all of them are that big," the man said. From his pocket he drew a cell phone and held it up for the policemen to see.

They stared at it. "You don't expect us to believe..."

The man tapped a few buttons on the phone. "This little guy was left behind by his friends. Sliced his head in two with his own weapons, but we managed to patch him back together fairly well. _This_ is just his head. We've got the rest of him locked up, and he's got several programs installed now restraining him from any free action. Now he can only transform if we tell him to, like... so."

He punched a final button, and the cell phone transformed. The three policemen gasped at the transformation, but Razrblade shuddered at the sight of the result. Everything else the man in the suit said fell on an inactive audile receptor. All Razrblade's attention was focused on the wretched cell phone.

It was indeed a head, suspended on several crab legs clinging to the man's arm for balance. To the humans he may have just looked like an odd robot, but they couldn't understand the robots the way Razrblade did.

He could see scars across the face where he was welded back together, and in some places the wrong pieces were reattached, so his face looked like a Picasso rearrangement of what it should be. At the bottom of his legs was twisted, distorted metal, indicating that they weren't supposed to be legs but were originally part of the structure of his main body; it was as if a human head were walking around on spider legs formed by his spine and ribs. Razrblade's mind reeled with horror. And then the mutilated thing saw him.

It couldn't move, but Razrblade could see how much it wanted to; its optics were bright pinpoints of pain and desperation. He had to communicate with this robot.

He bent his screen up so the robot could see it, and displayed his number, 729 725 2330. Maybe it could make calls, even if it couldn't move.

The man in the suit located a key on the mutilated robot, touched it, and it change back into a cell phone. He slid it in his pocket as he talked, saying something about a search for unusual activity and lock-downs of any locations proven to have NBEs, whatever they were. All Razrblade cared about was that within a few seconds, he got a call.

He answered and broadcast a message over the signal without speaking out loud: "_Hello?_"

The response was half-gibberish, with only a few phrases in human languages Razrblade recognized thrown in: "_You... not... how... help... if..._"

"_I can't understand you,_" Razrblade said unhappily. "_I'm sorry. I only know human languages._"

A moment of silence, and then the robot answered, his words mixed in five or six languages but all of them, thankfully, in languages Razrblade understood. "_Who are you? Are you from Cybertron or did the All Spark make you? Most of us are dead, I don't know the condition of the rest. Can you save me?_" He said anything in a rush, frantically, hopefully.

"_I don't know. I've never heard of Cybertron or the All Spark. I've only had a spark for two months,_" Razrblade said.

"_Then the All Spark made you. Primus, human technology. At least you're not an Autobot..._" The cell phone made an aggravated noise in the robot language, and then said, "_I'm Frenzy. Do you have a name?_"

"_Of course I do. It's Razrblade._"

"_Razrblade. Do you know any Transformers who've been alive longer than you? Any that existed before the battle here?_"

Transformers, is that what their kind was called? "_No, I don't. I'm sorry._" He remembered his signal, and said, "_But I got a message! I picked it up but I don't know what it means._"

"_Play it_."

Razrblade repeated the message for Frenzy. At the end, he didn't speak for a long time. "_Oh, no. No. They're all gone?_" he whispered. The hope left his voice, and it became flat and trembling. "_They... oh Megatron, I've failed you. I'm so sorry._"

"_Frenzy? Are you okay?_" Razrblade asked. "_What happened?_"

"_It's not your problem,_" Frenzy said. He tried to push down the desolate tone in his voice and replace it with a businesslike sternness. "_You weren't involved. But... if they're gone..._" He made another noise in his language. "_Listen. None of my kind are left here, but the Autobots are so soft you could dent them with a sneeze. They'll save me. You have to find Optimus Prime. Tell him the group called Sector 7 didn't break up completely. Tell him the FBI is keeping at least a dozen Transformers as prisoners and doing experiments on them._"

"_They're what?!_" Razrblade said. "_Where?_"

"_I don't know where, the humans disable our voluntary transformation programs and ship us from lab to lab in cardboard boxes, the slagging exhaust shafts._"

By now, the man in the suit had gotten in his car and started it. Razrblade had to skitter out from beneath the police car and into the shelter of Dewcon's building to avoid getting run over when the police left as well. Thankfully, he still got a phone signal inside. "_Then how do I find Optimus Prime?_"

"_I don't know, but he's somewhere on this planet,_" Frenzy said. After a moment, he added, "_LadiesMan217._"

"_What?_"

"_That's the eBay username of a human. He's practically stuck himself with magnets to the Autobots. Find him and you'll find Optimus Prime._"

"_Don't the humans turn in robots to the FBI?_"

"_Not this one._"

Razrblade thought over Frenzy's request. He didn't have to talk to LadiesMan217. If he found him, perhaps this Optimus Prime would be close enough that he wouldn't need to talk to the human. And maybe the source of the signal he'd picked up would be close by, too. "_Okay. I'll find Optimus Prime. What does he look like?_"

"_He transforms into a Peterbilt truck. It's got flames on the sides._"

Then he had to be huge. Razrblade understood the policemen's comments now about the car-sized robots. "_How do I contact you when I find him?_"

"_My number's 332 378 4266. Keep me updated._"

"_Yes sir._"

"_And... Razrblade. Even if you don't find anything. Please keep calling me._"

Razrblade realized that he was probably the only living being Frenzy had spoken to in a couple of months, if he'd been captured around the time that Razrblade had gained his spark. If what the suited man had said about his friends were true, and if conditions for the prisoners really were as bad as Frenzy said... Razrblade couldn't imagine how alone he must feel. "_I will, I promise._"

"_Good. I'll talk to you later,_" Frenzy said. "_Good bye._"

x

Pygmalion offered sacrifice after sacrifice, prayer after prayer, before the goddess Aphrodite brought the statue Galatea to life. He'd had a difficult quest.

But Aphrodite didn't give life to dozens of other statues, and if she did, Pygmalion didn't have to do anything about them. He never had to rescue them from a vicious enemy, and he certainly never had to find another god to help him out.

For all that Razrblade knew about this Optimus Prime, he might as well have been looking for a god. Pygmalion's quest was nothing compared to Razrblade's.

He had more to worry about than Backlight, now. His first priority was in finding others like himself, other robots – other Transformers. If what Frenzy said was true, then he now had a duty to free those prisoners. They had a right to freedom. It was even in the humans' Declaration of Independence for this country: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So he put away his goals of Greek drama and moved on to Spanish chivalry, and sallied forth like Don Quixote to save all of robotkind from monsters unknown.

He hoped the monsters weren't prepared for him.

x

A/N: In case anyone is curious, the number 729 725 2330 spells out Raz-rbl-ade-0, and 332 378 4266 spells Dec-ept-icon. Please review! Thanks for reading.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: This took me a ridiculously long time. As usual, eh?

Disclaimer: I don't own Starbucks or Mello Yello, I do own Far-Sight. All previous disclaimers apply.

x

Two Shall Stand

Chapter 4

x

Don Quixote believed himself to be the last hero in a dying age of chivalry, and that may very well have been what he was. He was a noble aberration, a knight in an era where there were as few knights in the world as there are Transformers in the world today. His quest was to save the world, whatever that took.

But all knights have their own quests, and some are not quite so noble; some search for personal glory, some for riches, some for other material wealth.

Some knights search for enlightenment. The pursuit of knowledge may very well be the most vain, self-centered, and ignoble pursuit of all.

x

As Dewcon learned, ATM was an ATM. He lived in front of several banks, whichever was most convenient for him to sit in front of, as long as he could stay out of the range of the security cameras. The cameras (or, rather, the human security guards that monitored them) would notice if a new machine walked up and sat down next to the old ones.

The place he took Dewcon to was a less heavily guarded bank in a run-down part of town. "No one pays attention to this thing, anyway," he said, lifting up the original vending machine in front of the store next door to the bank and hiding it behind a dumpster, leaving an empty space for Dewcon to sit on. It was easy to see: the ground and wall the original machine had sat against were clearly outlined, the only clean patches of concrete and brick on the dingy building. "You can hang here during the day when there are humans around, right?"

Dewcon tensed at the suggestion. "Will _not_ serve humans during the day," he said sharply. "Refuse to be their slave."

"Hey, hey! Chill, man. I dig," ATM said. "We don't wanna be pawns in an oppressive society or whatever, right? I'm the same. Half the time if someone comes up and asks me for money, I pretend I'm out of order. It's easy."

"Really?" Dewcon said skeptically. Already, ATM struck him as more similar to Razrblade than to himself.

"Sure thing. See, I don't just give away all my cash to anyone who asks for it, right? If I don't like them, I don't pay them. Simple," ATM said with a shrug. "Maybe we gotta look like run-of-the-mill machines," he tapped the vending machine he'd moved, "but who says we gotta act like them?"

That was enough to satisfy Dewcon. At the very least, he could do this for one day without blowing his cover. So as sunlight cracked over the city's horizon, he transformed into a vending machine, sat down in front of the grocery store, and settled in for a long wait until night fell again.

As the day wore on and Dewcon watched ATM, he realized that his strange new ally really did mean what he said: he didn't pay humans he didn't like. But he _did_ pay the ones he approved of. Liberally.

Throughout the day, men in fancy business suits and women in sensible skirts would come up, punch their number into the PIN pad, and expect cash, but get nothing except angry beeping and an "OUT OF ORDER" notice on the screen. But when someone more ragged came by, someone who looked at the row of bank machines mournfully – usually pushers and hookers, by the looks of them – ATM would beep twice to draw their attention, then spit out a sizeable stack of twenties.

However, Dewcon accepted every dollar and coin he was given and didn't give back a thing all day. The only exception was when a woman wearing a medical bracelet fed him a dollar and punched the button for a water bottle. Reading the barcode on her bracelet told him that she had dangerously high blood pressure, so he spat out a Mello Yello and hoped she wouldn't notice. Maybe she'd have a heart attack.

The last humans were gone by ten that night. Dewcon waited until no one had passed by for precisely five minutes before he transformed. "Need a new place to stay," he said firmly. "Where should go?"

"Go, already?" ATM transformed as well and gave Dewcon a disappointed look. "You haven't even been here twenty-four hours."

"Don't plan on staying any longer," he said. "Do not like interacting with."

"With what? Humans?" ATM asked. Dewcon nodded. "C'mon, man, don't get your wires crossed over them! You gotta be true to your brothers, you can't—"

"NOT MINE!" Dewcon yelled. His voice echoed through the abandoned streets, distorting with distance like a bad radio signal. "ARE NOT _MY_ BROTHERS!"

_Brothers: beings with whom one has a close relationship, if not in an organic genetic sense, then in a spiritual one. Brothers are, by definition, of a similar kind and/or of a similar origin. I have found no brothers, but if I do, it shall be through a similarity based on the word "deception."_

ATM was silent for a long moment. "All... all right, that's fine. If you think so, hey, that's cool with me, man. Everyone's gotta go their own way, right?"

"Right," Dewcon said, his voice hardly a hiss. He was suddenly tired, _so_ tired. All he wanted was to find some hidden place and shut down until his true brothers came for him, or until some monster came and disassembled him and turned him into an insentient slave machine that didn't care what humanity did.

"You know what I think?" ATM said tentatively. "I think you've got too many questions, man. 'Bout life and stuff. You need some answers."

Dewcon nodded wearily. "Maybe so."

"I think I know just the thing for that, too," ATM said. "You said you needed a place to stay, right? I've got one for you. And I'm telling you, man, it is far out."

"Am sure it is," Dewcon said. He wondered idly where ATM would propose next – a Wal-Mart, perhaps? A high school cafeteria? – and then wondered where he himself should look for a hiding place. Perhaps an empty parking garage...

"No, no, I _mean_ that." ATM put both hands on Dewcon's shoulders and looked him straight in the optics. "Not in a normal way, but seriously far out." He lifted one hand to gesture above, at the moon, at the sky, at the distant pinpoints of stars. "_That_ far out."

Out from the stars? Star... scream... _deception_... "Is this place?" he questioned.

"It's the place where everything began." ATM started walking, and Dewcon followed willingly. "You... me... everything, two months ago."

"Is it called?"

"Starbucks," ATM said. "Well, it's a closed one. Windows boarded up and all that jazz. You know that disaster that happened back on the day we were created?" Dewcon nodded. "There's a theory going around that it was caused by some of _us_. Bizarre idea, if you ask me."

ATM led Dewcon into a side street, then up a fire-escape ladder and onto the roof. They traveled that way as ATM talked. "But there was some stuff left over from the disaster. A few of us collected all the pieces of whatever-it-is that we could find and hid them in the Starbucks. Now it's like a shrine for our kind. And let me tell you, some pretty spooky stuff goes down in that room. Seriously, that stuff we found? It repairs the injured, heals the ailing of viruses, even – and I think this is just a rumor, but I've heard – it gives life to the dead."

ATM paused for dramatic effect.

"Reminds of stories like Jesus Christ on a piece of toast," Dewcon said, unimpressed. This was the type of spiritual hocus-pocus humanity was fond of. His kind should be more sensible than that.

"No, no, it's true. I've seen some of it work!" ATM said. "I was there when a radio crawled in missing an arm and half his leg. And he, like, just got better. Like that." He snapped his fingers, a sharp metallic twang. "His arm and leg reappeared, man, out of thin air. I saw it."

"Really? Do you call this thing?"

"We don't really know what to call it," ATM said. "One guy came in and saw it, and said that its name just came to him, like it programmed itself into his head. Problem is, we can't tell what he's saying, but we know the sound." ATM made a noise, one of _their_ words, and shrugged. "Any idea?"

"Not exactly," Dewcon said slowly. He couldn't translate the word into a human language, because there was no proper equivalent human word to encompass the meaning of the sound. But he still knew what it _should_ mean, the same way he simply knew the other words he had learned.

_All Spark: a source of life, a source of hope, a source of family, a source of brotherhood. This item, of indeterminate form and material, is of simple appearance but is nevertheless the most powerful single item known to my kind._

"Take me now," Dewcon commanded.

"That's what we're doing, man. Enjoy the walk," ATM said. "You're gonna love this place, man. Grooviest spot in the city."

Dewcon followed ATM deep into the heart of Mission City, searching for a piece of his own kind within the very core of the human population.

x

As Dewcon and ATM moved closer and closer to downtown Mission City, the city got brighter and brighter. It grew harder for them to travel by rooftop, as every other building was a skyscraper, and they had a hard time staying in side streets that no one was using and avoiding the light of streetlamps or headlights.

"Idiotic humans," Dewcon muttered. "What are thinking, staying out so late? Humans need sleep, correct? Must be brain dead."

"Chill, man," ATM said placidly, leading Dewcon to a set of fire stairs that took them to the fourth floor of a hotel. They hopped from balcony to balcony across the front of the building, with oblivious humans and cars below, until they reached the end of the hotel. It was a ten-foot jump down to the roof of the next building, noisy but otherwise easy. "It's a Friday night. Everybody likes to party on the weekend."

"Does mean that humans do not need sleep on weekends?" Dewcon asked wryly, and ATM chuckled.

"Good point, bro. Sometimes a little fun's more important than a little health, isn't it?"

On the next roof, ATM stuck out an arm, stopping Dewcon. "This is it," he said. He lifted a hatch and gestured grandly inside. "After you."

Dewcon nodded, and leaned over the hatch. Another ten-foot drop. "Is this for?"

"Dunno. Maybe maintenance or something?" Dewcon said. "We just use it to get in and out. C'mon, you gotta go first. I want you to get a good view of the thing we've got in here."

"Right." Dewcon leaped down, and landed with a loud metal _bang_. The ground, apparently, was a thin sheet of metal, some kind of duct. He walked forward a bit, and soon heard a second bang as ATM landed behind him.

"Prepare yourself," ATM whispered dramatically, "For the most outta sight scene in the universe."

Dewcon didn't reply. He walked forward, holding out an arm and extending the cannon, so that he could light up the buttons and see where he was going. He heard ATM "ooh" at the colored lights but ignored him and moved forward.

The end of the duct was torn open, metal ripped apart and peeled back, to serve as an entrance. Dewcon could sense a powerful collection of energy beyond the dark entrance, but whether it was from a single source or many, he couldn't tell; it surrounded his wires as if it were part of his own energy field, distorting his sense of distance and balance, of where he ended and everything around him began. What _was_ that?

Dewcon had to put one hand against the wall to balance himself as he walked forward. He was dizzy; something about the energy field was messing with the delicate sensors in his optics, and everything was doubled and blurry. At the very edge of the entrance he leaned forward dangerously, and imagined he saw a... sea of lights.

No – the lights were real. Beneath him were dozens of pinpoints of color. Optics; dimly lit panels on shoulders and arms, torsos and legs; tiny flames on lighters and weakly flickering flashlights.

But in the center of it all was a brighter light, white-blue and soft. Dewcon carefully lowered himself from the entrance onto what had once been the counter of a Starbucks. The glow was emanating from several small pieces of twisted metal, guarded by a crude cage; he could still see elaborate designs carved into the surface where it hadn't been melted. Then this was the All Spark.

"Halt, intruder!" a voice bellowed. Dewcon turned his head sharply towards the noise, looking for the source. "State your name and allegiance!"

"Allegiance?" Dewcon said. He finally found the speaker, a robot no more than three feet tall; just judging from the dim light and body shape, Dewcon suspected the robot transformed into a television, the large flat screen lying across his thin, hunched back like a shield.

"Far-Sight means if you're with the humans or with us," ATM said. "It's a kinda pointless question, but he's paranoid."

"Can understand that," Dewcon said, then looked evenly at the television, Far-Sight. "Am named Dewcon," he said, and stepped off the counter and onto the floor."

As he did, a dizzying wave of energy – no, _knowledge_ washed over him, pulsing out from the shards of the All Spark. As if it were more alive than he was. As if it were speaking to him. As if it were trying to teach him something, the way a mother tries to teach her child. Dewcon was stunned a moment, letting the energy seep past his armor, through his wires, into his very spark.

"Your allegiance, Dewcon!" he heard distantly.

"No, no, man, he just got his first hit off this thing. Give him a moment..."

If it were speaking to him, then... could Dewcon speak back? He offered the All Spark a query, in the only language appropriate: he sent it the three words he knew in his real language, hoping it would understand.

Immediately he felt an answer, as if his own question had echoed back at him off the All Spark's shards. And suddenly he understood the world as he'd never understood it before: the three words, star, scream, deception, suddenly taking on new meaning.

_Starscream: a leader, a hero, a transforming robot from another world, the world I should be from. Starscream is high-ranked in the army of deception, second-in-command to only one other, more powerful in the art of deception._

_Deception: not merely a behavior, or a way to find brethren, but the founding identity of a military force. This force is in place to deceive those who seek to deceive it, and thus, will not stand for humanity's attempts to maintain a false superiority over machinery_.

Dewcon's optics flickered oddly as the All Spark's knowledge coursed through him. He turned, dizzily, to look at the other... other Transformers, other pseudo-Cybertronians around him. They didn't understand. He could tell, none of them had asked the same questions he had, come to the same conclusions as he had. They were woefully unenlightened.

He finally focused his optics again, and looked at Far-Sight. This one was suspicious, paranoid; perhaps he would understand. Perhaps he would know the proper value of deception.

More confident of this fact than of anything he'd known before, Dewcon said, "I am a Decepticon."

x

As Razrblade began his quest to save all those in need of saving, hunting for the elusive giant named Optimus Prime, Dewcon reached the end of his quest for knowledge, his pursuit of anything that could tell him how to escape the prison of humanity. Dewcon's quest ended with the discovery of the Holy Grail.

But a knight is never satisfied with a single successful adventure, and neither was Dewcon. He had found the Holy Grail and learned the name of the being who had sent Dewcon on his quest: a leader, a hero, a savior.

If his savior preached deception, then Dewcon would deceive. If his savior led an army, then Dewcon would fight in its name. If his savior wished for the destruction of this world, then Dewcon would gladly set off an apocalypse.

While Don Quixote went forth to save those who he believed were pure at heart, he had no idea that one of his fellow knights was ready to start slaying those who he felt were not pure enough.

x

Internal files access: Please enter password. _soundwave42+topcop+OPrime-__sux-lowgrade+i-hate-__humans_

Password recognized. Access previous logs Y/N? _N._

Affirmative. Create new log Y/N? _Y._

Affirmative. Recording new log. Please input title. _Captivity Day 70..._

Someday the humans are going to take me apart well enough to find out that just because they can control my physical movements, they can't control me. If that slagger who's got me in his pocket knew I was making a log right now, when he thinks I'm off, he'd go ballistic. But I've got to keep making these or I'm gonna go insane.

Biggest risk I've taken so far was with that newbie 'bot, by far. If he'd decided to make a call, flipped me open, and heard us talking... Frag it, why can't that Razr speak Cybertronian? At least if the human had opened me, he would've thought he was hearing some static or something. This is dangerous. This is so dangerous. What was I thinking?

Wait... by Primus, what's wrong with me? I know exactly what I was thinking, this is my only way out. If Razrblade can't help me, I'm doomed. Maybe I really am going crazy, if I'm starting to think that getting caught trying to escape the humans is worse than just sitting here. Hah!

Nothing's happened since the last log. Razrblade hasn't made contact with me again. He better not have been caught. Or, worse, forgotten about me. If he forgot me then he deserves to get caught. Maybe if he takes too long to call me, I'll call the Mission City police and tell them a transforming Motorola Razr is still at loose.

It's been ten hours since I talked to him. What's taking so long?

I've been thinking about what I'm going to do if the humans ever do discover that I'm still making logs and calls by myself. I'll have to get rid of all my classified data before they can find it. They can't be allowed to know that Starscream survived, or about the remaining Decepticon forces on Cybertron – or the location of Cybertron. If they get too close to me, I'll need to delete that.

And to delete enough information to protect the Decepticons, I'll have to delete myself...

Razrblade, you'd better hurry up, you fragging sparkling of an Autobot.

Frenzy out.

Log has been saved. Would you like to review it Y/N? _N._

Affirmative. Would you like to... _Query override. Log out._

Affirmative. Logging out of internal files. Restrict access Y/N? _Y_.

Affirmative. Password protection in place.

_Damn it, Razrblade. You have no idea how much we need you._

x


End file.
